26.08.2009
Ideological pigeonholes
Dave Osler reviews Ervand Abrahamians A history of modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp224, £14.99) and Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Mahjoob Zweiris Iran and the rise of its neoconservatives (IB Tauris, 2007, pp215, £20)
Dramatic turn in the political situation somewhere in the world? That is usually no problem for the British far left, which, luckily for the proletariat in question, is typically able to rattle off some authoritative advice and guidance within a matter of hours.
Mothership sections of international tendencies in particular are prone to knock out a list of transitional demands almost on the spot, often in the format, Workers must ... Otherwise we get grandiloquent proclamations of military but not political support from small groups of middle class Brits one suspects almost certainly do not know how to strip down an AK47.
Yet initial reaction to the massive street protests that have shaken Iran in the wake of the presidential elections were somehow slower. Blimey, you could almost hear people thinking through the politics.
Could it possibly be that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really did win fair and square on the back of support from the rural poor, and should thus be extended support? Were the protestors what democracy looked like, or were they rather the Gucci-clad jeunesse dorée of north Tehran, acting as sock puppets for a colour revolution?
Real differences of opinion emerged on such basic issues as the nature of the Iranian government. Prominent Socialist Workers Party leader Alex Callinicos - speaking at this years Marxism conference - reportedly argued that the regime was not a dictatorship, but should rather be categorised as Thermidorian.
If there is an obvious analogy with either the French or Russian experiences of Thermidor, I must concede it is not immediately apparent to me. Meanwhile, the Alliance for Workers Liberty goes one step further and characterises Iran as a clerical fascist state.
Terms such as these have specific meaning for Marxists and should not be used unless they can be adequately defended at the theoretical level. After reading the two books I review in this piece, I would need some convincing that either of the above designations is correct.
My decision to purchase these works - with my own money, by the way - was motivated by recognition that I should know more about Iran than I did when the demonstrations erupted.
It is not that I havent been paying attention. The Iranian revolution of 1979 is one of the first major world events that I took an interest in as a young man. I have read several of the standard far-left accounts of what happened in that year.
They tend to argue that the dynamic was broadly one of proletarian revolution against the shah - complete with proto-soviets and everything - until that sneaky ayatollah bloke flew back from Paris and craftily redirected the mass anger behind Islamist ends.
As Abrahamians run-through of the 20th century history of Iran - known for part of the period as Persia - makes plain, that is an obvious oversimplification. Written from a broadly liberal or perhaps soft left viewpoint, A history of modern Iran delivers the goods it announces on its jacket in around 200 pages.
It tells the story of a social formation that underwent the kind of transformation that took centuries elsewhere in rather short order. In 1900, around a quarter of the population was still nomadic; by 2000, Iran was a predominantly urban middle-income country with a serious industrial base.
The kind of social tensions Marxists would predict from those facts did in fact manifest themselves. Hence Iran has seen such events as the constitutional revolution of 1906, part of the fallout from what happened in Russia the previous year; Mohammad Mossadeqs nationalist interregnum from 1951 to 1953; the shahs white revolution of the 1960s; and, of course, the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
Abrahamian also clearly underlines the extent to which British imperialism had a hand in shaping the countrys history. Ahmadinejads apparent belief that the British embassy orchestrated the recent protests may have been paranoid, but he certainly had plenty of historical precedent to fuel his paranoia.
Iran may never formally have been a British colony, but that did not stop London treating it like one, especially when the interests of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company were at stake. Britain was indisputably a key player in both the constitutional revolution and the ouster of Mossadeq, for instance.
Often, cynical carve-ups were agreed with Russia, in either its tsarist or Stalinist guise. In 1941, Britain and the USSR jointly invaded Iran to secure control of the oilfields and to institute regime change. Sound at all familiar?
The authors other main theme is the emergence of the Iranian state machine. Although he does not use the Marxist terminology, Pahlavi dynasty founder Reza Shah is presented essentially as some kind of Bonapartist, inspired by Kemal Atatürk and perhaps Benito Mussolini.
Much as the theocracy would hate to acknowledge it, Iran probably has the Pahlavis to thank for relative modernity. Father and son built a centralised state out of a clan-based society, dispensing with tribalism and curbing the clergy in the process. Both these men were corrupt and murderous, of course, but they did serve a certain historical function.
There is also some useful material on the Tudeh Party, one of the few mass communist parties ever to emerge in the Middle East, which garnered substantial encouragement from the Soviet invasion. On some estimates, it would have won about 40% in a free election. It is worth noting that communism was long influential in Persia and Iran, in various guises, as evidenced by such episodes as the short-lived Soviet Republic of Gilan in 1920 and 1921.
The suppression of Tudeh by the Pahlavi state was certainly consequential, Abrahamian notes: This destruction paved the way for the eventual emergence of a religious movement. In other words, the [1953] coup helped replace nationalism, socialism and liberalism with Islamic fundamentalism One can argue that the real roots of the 1979 revolution go back to 1953.
I would have expected more on the role of the Iranian working class and the left from a man who cites a debt to Marx and Braudel in his introduction. Indeed, more class analysis in general would have been useful.
Assuming that Irans bazaari commercial class essentially equates to a European bourgeoisie, what are the implications of 1979 for the perspective of permanent revolution? Did the bazaaris pull off - albeit in distorted form - a trick of a kind of which the theory essentially stipulates they should be incapable? In the end, just two days of street fighting were enough to put an end to 2,500 years of monarchy.
Abrahamian, like Callinicos, uses the term Thermidor to describe the period 1989 to 2005. But the term is casually introduced and its content not explained. While the author does list a number of achievements that represent social progress - improved life expectancy and infant mortality stats, subsidised food, widespread education - it is clear that he does not consider them an adequate trade-off for Irans democratic shortcomings.
Enteshami and Zweiri concentrate on the politics of recent years, detailing how widespread disillusion with president Mohammad Khatami and his reformist Second Khordad movement paved the way for the rise of what they insist on calling a neoconservative faction.
Ironically, it was the reformists that gave the masses the voice and the tools to articulate their concerns, and it was the movements failure to deliver on the tangible needs of the people that left the door open for neoconservative forces to present themselves as a new alternative, we are told.
There is much useful biographical material on Ahmadinejad. Interestingly, he is - like Margaret Thatcher - the offspring of devoutly religious small-town grocery storekeeper. Obviously a background to watch out for.
But if there is a sense in which president and his pals can properly be described as neoconservatives rather than conservatives, Enteshami and Zweiri do not to my mind successfully make it, or even try to do so in anything other than perfunctory fashion. Drawing an implicit parallel with the Washington-based geniuses that brought about the debacle in neighbouring Iraq might make for savvy marketing, but does not appear to be sound political science.
The authors are on stronger ground when they make the point that much of Ahmadinejads cabinet is drawn from the military and security sectors, and have taken inspiration from Beijing. They want to liberalise the economy, through the greater use of market mechanisms, while maintaining authoritarian rule: Irans new right fully understood the language of market capitalism, they write. What it objected to was its American garb under the conditions of globalisation.
Even that comparison between the respective strategies of the Chinese and Iranian ruling classes is insufficient. As Enteshami and Zweiri repeatedly and rightly insist, Ahmadinejad has sought to legitimise himself through blatant right populism, in a way that Chinas leaders do not, and that clearly confuses many on the British left.
Thus his backers speak airily of a programme built on the promotion of justice, attention to the needs of the people, serving the masses and the material and moral progress of the country. But any amount of self-interested grandstanding towards the poor does not make Ahmadinejad any kind of progressive.
While the contention is not for a moment considered, the book does give sufficient detail to defuse the charge that Iran represents combination of adjective-fascism. It is not a democracy, of course. Any country in which being a socialist or a communist can cost you your life can hardly qualify as that.
Enteshami and Zweiri point to what they call a duality of leadership, in which an entrenched clerical caste acts as a check on political tendencies - new right as well as reformist. Thus majlis candidates need establishment approval to run, and real power lies with the supreme leader rather than the president. Support from powerful state institutions was vital to Ahmadinejads success.
But presidential elections do constitute mechanisms in which competing platforms - sufficiently differentiated to be perceived as meaningful alternatives, even though always bourgeois in content - fight it out for a popular mandate. Ahmadinejad would not have won in 2005 had so many reform supporters not abstained.
A political space exists in which protests involving hundreds of thousands of demonstrators can be organised. As far as I am aware, that would not have been possible in any fascist state yet known in history.
The Islamic Republic is a theocratic dictatorship sui generis, and we should earnestly desire its downfall; while we would like to see that job achieved by the Iranian working class, we should acknowledge that even bourgeois democracy would be an advance.
Some readers will no doubt condemn that last suggestion as an unprincipled ideological concession to imperialist pressure, rather than a first step towards the re-emergence of both independent trade unionism of the type exemplified by the illegal bus workers union in Tehran, and ultimately Marxist politics. That, I am afraid, is testimony to the prevalence of anti-imperialist reductionism on the British left.
My main conclusion is that Marxists need to do a better analytical job on Iranian politics, rather than attempt to force it into the pigeonholes generally deployed in western political discourse. Branding Irans ruling class either Thermidorian or clerical-fascist seems to me not particularly to extend our understanding of the class forces at work.
Ultimately, Enteshami and Zweiri do not help us too much in this task. Their book is aimed at a policymaker audience rather than activists, and in that context even goes so far as to present a helpful menu of potential policies for the US. But the overall political framework is once again broadly liberal.
In sum, neither book represents an ideal read for the far left, and perhaps an Iranian comrade can produce something better. But if you, like me, are playing catch-up, both are useful to a degree.